About Rosie 翁宜寧
Land and Family
I was born in and have spent much of my life in California (mostly in the San Francisco Bay area), with four pre-adolescent years in Colorado. I now live in Tainan, in the south of Taiwan.
My parents are both from central Taiwan, and separately immigrated to the United States in the late 1960s, where they met and married. On both sides, my distant ancestors are Hokkien from Fujian, China.
From an early age, I felt a subterranean sense of distance from land, culture, and extended family that went unnamed for decades.
I’m a 妹妹 little sister with one 哥哥 older brother. Both my parents are the youngest by far of their respective five siblings. That makes me the youngest in my generation on both sides of my extended family.
I mention this because there’s a way that my life has been fated and supported to be one of playful discovery and sandbox excavation. My Taiwanese relatives still call me 小妞, which roughly translates to “little chick,” an endearing nickname that was given to me when I was a little girl, in a way kinda funny for a woman nearing half a century, yet somehow it still works.
Over time, this path of discovery has drawn me back across the Pacific, where I’ve been able to re-knit ties with my ancestors, relatives, and cultural roots in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I was younger.
翁 family ancestral tomb
Astrology
I’m a 丁巳 fire snake (also a 辛亥 metal pig, 己亥 earth pig, and 壬申 water monkey) and 陰 yin by nature. My lunar hexagram is 63 既濟 and solar hexagram is 54 歸妹. Transformation is the drumbeat of my life, and learning to trust my own tempo—often different from the prevailing one—brings harmony into its rhythms.
Journey and Current Landscape
My conscious healing journey began in my early twenties, when I was living with a chronic illness. That experience opened my curiosity about the roots of illness and led me to study holistic nutrition and food as medicine. Through cooking, I discovered both healing and joy, and spent years teaching and sharing food as a medium of connection, care, and alchemy.
As my journey continued, healing revealed itself in layers, and my commitment to it deepened with each layer. A growing yearning to reclaim the cultural identity I once distanced myself from drew me toward meditation groups, healing circles, podcasts, and beginning Mandarin classes.
Looking back, the through-line of my life has been a search for belonging—one that has slowly led me back to the languages and the spiritual, religious, and cultural traditions of my people.
I am currently an instructor at Folks Healing, which brings together education, clinical care, and shared practice within a cosmology rooted in ancestral and indigenous wisdom. I also teach in and support the Navajo Healing Project, which trains Diné interns in traditional Chinese medicine. Twice a year the project brings me back to Dinétah for its free pop-up clinics serving the reservation.
Today my ongoing studies of Chinese and Daoist cosmology—especially through the I Ching and Chen-style tai chi—sit at the heart of both my healing and my teaching. These practices have helped me make sense of my life in retrospect and recognize how this wisdom has been with me all along, even when I was turned away from it.
My happiest days are spacious ones—time with myself woven together with moments of eating, playing, and moving alongside people with whom I can simply be. Food remains one of my favorite forms of alchemy.
Here in Tainan, I feel lucky to be living this way. I wander morning vegetable markets, spend time reading and studying, practice tai chi, and share delicious meals with my teachers and community.
Over time, I’ve come to see change as a teacher and the I Ching as my most trusted companion in listening to its wisdom.
